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All right, all right, I admit there has not been a content update in quite a while now, but that doesn’t mean that the blog is dead! It’s still very much alive and still going strong with some a lot of daily visits.

The life signs might have been weak, but that doesn’t mean that the heart wasn’t beating. I’ve still been doing the required WordPress-maintenance; approving comments, updating, emptying the spam (some 14k messages per time!). So why didn’t I write?

I’d say time constraints. But that’s only half the truth.

I’d say that I’ve done nothing interesting, nothing that is worth writing about. But that simply wouldn’t be true.

It’s more a combination between having a lot of other engaging projects, together with already having too much stuff to write for other purposes.

There’s a certain beauty to automatization. The machine works silently, completing time-wasting tasks for you, while you spend your time doing things that matter.

I like to keep my computer tidy – a cluttered desktop just makes me frustrated. Why? Because it takes forever to find something in a digital mess. The desktop tends to become cluttered, however, because cleaning isn’t fun. Moving icons to the right folders is in many ways just like cleaning, and cleaning is a chore. Chores are for the most part never fun.

To battle this, I wrote a script some time back which cleaned my desktop once per boot and put the contents into a folder with today’s date. With the hard drive storage capacity available, storing the vast amounts of files isn’t an issue. I have a lot of trash stored, but it’s easy to navigate and it keeps my desktop tidy.

Today, I took care of another issue. How do you keep track of your files if you have two computers? How do you transfer files? And why should you have to spend time on moving files? I bought a new laptop for school and work, which meant I had to find a way to move files. Windows file sharing works, but it’s time consuming. Dropbox could eliminate the problem, but it’s not suitable for large amounts of data. I do use Dropbox if it’s important only to have one version of the file, or if I need to access it on other devices, however.

I wrote another script as the solution. Every time i log on, it moves all the contents of an upload-folder to my server if I’m connected to my home network. This way, I can drop files into the folder, and forget about them. The script also downloads all files from a remote folder, and stores them locally in another folder. Essentially, I can move files asynchronous via a server.

All of this took some time to set up, but I’ll save more time in the long run.

It’s fun getting to know how things work, and configuring them to work as you want them to. Today, I wrote a to do list of all the things I wanted to fix, and proceeded with checking them of one by one.

I recently bought a new laptop. New computers mean installing software, removing software (so much bundled crap…) and tweaking. There’s still a lot to do, such as syncing files and organizing backups.

I use Irssi as my IRC client (runs on a server) and finally configured it to auto run my scripts and join my servers and channels. It’s not hard to do that manually, as the server rarely goes down for maintenance. Still, if you can automate it… you should. There’s a whole bunch of Irssi scripts you can utilize. If you don’t know where to start, check this post out. The author covers a lot of good scripts.

Some SSH stuff. Changing keys, moving configs, learning how to tunnel traffic. I found a great and simple guide on how to create a ssh tunnel.

My router has been running DD-WRT for about two weeks now. Did some poking around in there as well.